Death Row

When Tuesday's hearings in Sacramento on proposed changes in California's method of executing convicted murderers veered into a discussion of why solutions to the state's budget crisis ought to include the abolition of capital punishment, it was another example of how divided our attitude on this issue remains.

California prison officials executed 76-year-old murderer Clarence Ray Allen at the state prison here early today after his final appeal was turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court. His death was announced at 12:38 a.m. by Elaine Jennings of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Allen, who turned 76 Monday, was by far the oldest of the 13 convicts executed in the state since California restored the death penalty in 1977 and the second oldest in the nation.

After several tumultuous years of failed bids and aborted takeovers, notorious rap music label Death Row was plucked off the auction block once more, this time by a Canadian entertainment company that offered $18 million. Toronto-based WIDEawake Entertainment Group submitted the winning bid to U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles against competitors Warner Music Group and Conquest Media Group.

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs. The examination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimated that the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for the condemned adds $184 million to the budget each year.

Nearly 3 1/2 years into a court-ordered suspension of executions, opponents have embraced a new argument: that Californians can't afford to carry out the death penalty in a constitutional manner.

Thirteen years ago, Edward Patrick Morgan asked the California Supreme Court for a lawyer to investigate and challenge his 1996 death sentence for a murder in Orange County. The court has yet to find Morgan an attorney. The inability of the state to recruit lawyers for post-conviction challenges, or habeas corpus petitions, has caused a major bottleneck in the state's criminal justice system. Nearly half of those condemned to die in California are awaiting appointment of counsel for these challenges.

Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. is scheduled to be executed Thursday in Texas. He is not a sympathetic figure — he was convicted of bludgeoning a 16-year-old girl to death with a piece of asphalt after raping her — and his gruesome crime is in many ways similar to those of dozens of other death-row inmates across the country. But here's what is different: He is a Mexican citizen, and when he was arrested in 1994, he was never told that under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, he was entitled to ask the Mexican consulate for help.

Police and death row inmates agree on one thing, a law enforcement group told its members: They both oppose next week's ballot measure to replace the death penalty with life without parole. That statement, in a newsletter from the Los Angeles Police Protective League opposing Proposition 34, highlighted what some California criminal defense lawyers have been saying for months. Many death row inmates who are years away from execution would rather gamble on being executed than lose their state-paid lawyers, a preference that seems to be confirmed by a limited, informal survey of some on California's death row. VOTER GUIDE: 2012 California Propositions "That is a significant sentiment, since the death penalty in California is mostly life without parole anyway," said Don Specter, director of California's Prison Law Office, who personally supports the initiative.

A murderer who spent 26 years on death row has died of natural causes, the 70th condemned prisoner to succumb to old age, suicide or murder compared with 13 executed by the state since capital punishment resumed in 1978, the state reported Thursday. Albert Cecil Howard, 57, died at a hospital near San Quentin State Prison on Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement. Howard was convicted and sentenced to death a year after the May 25, 1982, murder of 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County.